Quotes About Discovery

There's so much in the world that has already been done, but there are plenty of things left for people who want to go get it.

I'm really quite bad at coming up with plot ideas. I like to create characters and just see what will happen to them when I let them loose!

I like to allow a story to arise as I'm writing scripts. I find it horrible when I try to think of something for the plot without really being on the ground and seeing where it goes.

Plot is not my forte. It's like I have to live in my head in the book for a while before I figure out what the story is... My process is a bit messier.

It's amazing how far you can get into a plot before you figure out what you're doing.

Sometimes I'm asked if I do research for my stories. The answer is yes and no. No, in the sense that I seldom plow through books at the library to gather material. Yes, in the sense that the first fifteen years of my life turned out to be one big research project.

The currencies of science are discoveries and ideas; the rewards are the excitement of going where nobody has been before and, if one is inclined to such things, the kudos of peer acclaim, plus funds to do more research.

I think that one of the things that will come out of the New Horizons mission is that the public will take a look, and they won't know what else to call Pluto but a planet - and a pretty exciting one.

I can't imagine how many kids around the world will look at pictures of Pluto and think, 'I want to grow up to be a scientist.'

Back before the Kuiper Belt was discovered, Pluto did look like a misfit that didn't belong with either the terrestrials or the giant planets.

The Pluto system is much more complex than I had expected.

I call Pluto the harbinger.

Pluto is the new Mars.

I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.

One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn't know was in you, or in the world.

The most exciting thing is to read a poem out loud for the first time.

Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next.

I want to just go to places where writers don't usually go, where people like me don't usually show up, and say, 'Here are some poems. Do they speak to you? What do you hear in them?'

I first came across 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' in college, with other anthologized poems by Yeats.

You want a poem to unsettle something. There's a deep and interesting kind of troubling that poems do, which is to say, 'This is what you think you're certain of, and I'm going to show you how that's not enough. There's something more that might be even more rewarding if you're willing to let go of what you already know.'

'Finally' actually started out as a poem. I always wrote poetry, and pretty soon I figured out that if I could write poems, I could write songs.

I started out in graduate school to be a fiction writer. I thought I wanted to write short stories. I started writing poems at that point only because a friend of mine dared me to write a poem. And I took the dare because I was convinced that I couldn't write a good poem... And then it actually wasn't so bad.

I think I felt at some point that I couldn't understand poetry or that it was beyond me or it didn't speak to my experience. I think that was because I hadn't yet found the right poems to invite me in.

That sense of mystery, but also of revelation, is what I turn to poems for. They're able to embody experience. We need more and more of that.